Monday, 16 December 2013

When we talk, the nods, gestures, posture and body
movements that we make convey important messages to our conversational
partners. They can help in understanding meaning and can show whose turn it is
to speak next. They can also display how we feel about the person we’re talking
to.

Mary Lavelle, Patrick
Healey and Rosemarie McCabe confirm that nodding and hand
gestures affect the amount of interpersonal rapport that people experience when
they are talking to each other. They set up an experiment where 40 groups of
three people were asked to do the ‘balloon task’. This task is a good way of
getting people to talk to each other: they are asked to imagine that a hot air balloon
is losing height and about to crash. The only way for anyone to survive is for
one of the three passengers to jump to a certain death. The three passengers
are a cancer scientist, a pregnant primary school teacher and her husband, who
is also the pilot. The task of the group is to decide which of the three should
make the jump. The conversations in the groups lasted about five and a half
minutes, and each participant then rated on a ten point scale the level of
rapport they had felt with their conversational partners.

They were not told, however, that in half of the
groups one of the participants was suffering from schizophrenia, a condition
that apart from its other symptoms often means patients use less non-verbal
communication than expected.

During the conversations the patients with
schizophrenia spoke less than the healthy participants, and they used fewer gestures
when speaking and fewer nods when listening. The more severe their schizophrenic
symptoms, the less often they nodded when listening, thus giving fewer
indicators of understanding to their partners. Interestingly, the conversational
partners compensated by gesturing more when they were speaking themselves,
perhaps because they assumed the patients had not been paying attention or were
not understanding well. This shows, then, how we adapt our nonverbal cues to
the behavior of others during the flow of conversation.

The experiment also showed that gestures in themselves
are not enough to achieve interpersonal understanding. Patients with more
severe symptoms gestured more when speaking but this (together with more
negative symptoms and poorer social cognition) resulted in their partners giving
poorer ratings for interpersonal rapport. The researchers point out that gestures
were measured mechanically, in terms of speed, so the total number may have
included movements that were not helpful to communication (scratching, for
example, or displacement behavior). They also note that successful
communication relies on gestures that are relevant to communication being well
coordinated with speech: if patients are not able to harmonize their verbal and
nonverbal features, this would impact on others’ experience of rapport with
them.

This exploratory study shows how people’s nonverbal
behavior and experience of interpersonal rapport changes in response to the
behavior of a schizophrenic patient even when they are unaware of their
diagnosis. It has implications therefore for therapy designed to combat the
social isolation that tends to accompany this illness. More generally, it shows
how important nonverbal communication is for establishing rapport between
conversational partners, and how we design the nonverbal cues we use in the
flow of conversation in response to those used by others.----------------------------------

Monday, 9 December 2013

A lot of sociolinguistic work has
focussed on how males and females use linguistic features in spoken
language. This research has led to
certain features being associated more with male use, such as I references (e.g. I think….) and quantity references (e.g. it was 24 metres), while references to emotion (e.g. a happy occasion) and verbs expressing
uncertainty (e.g. it seemsto be…) are linked to female use.

But are these gender-associated
language features also used in written language? Anthony
Mulac, Howard
Giles, James
J. Bradac and Nicholas
A. Palomares enlisted the help of 127 19-21 year old students and asked
them to produce a written description of 5 different photographic images
depicting nature scenes (such as a mountain reflected in a lake). The experiment had five stages. Participants had to:

·write a description of the first image (this was
the control task - as no other instruction was given, the researchers assumed
that this was a natural reflection of the participants’ language use)

·write a description as if they were:

a.a man describing it to a man

b.aman describing it to a woman

c.a woman describing it to a man

d.a woman describing it to a woman

By imposing these conditions,
Mulac and his colleagues could test whether the writers’ language altered
according to the gender of the perceived recipient of the description or the
gender persona that they were told to adopt.

Each description from the
participants was anonymously coded for gender-specific language features (such
as those mentioned above) and the control description was used as a base for
comparing their language use in the other four scenarios.

The results showed gender
differentiation in the the control task. In the natural descriptions (with no
instruction from the researchers), males and females used more of the features
associated with their gender. The
researchers note that this is evidence of gender-linked language at an
unconscious level.

In addition, when the participants were asked
to write as either a male or female, there was an increase in their use of
appropriate gender features. For
example, males writing under the guise of a female adopted more ‘female’
features, such as emotional references, while females writing under a male
guise increased the use of ‘male’ features like quantity references. This, the researchers suggest, means that, in
addition to unconscious knowledge of gender-linked language, there are some
features of language that are gender-linked stereotypes. These stereotyped features can be accessed
and manipulated by people when they want to present different gender
affiliations.

In contrast, the results did not
show any manipulation of gender features according to the perceived audience
(for example, males didn’t alter their language use according to whether they
were writing to a female or male). Also,
the results didn’t show any increase in gender features when writing to someone
of the same gender. Previous research
had suggested that, for example, a male conversing with another male may
increase his use of ‘male language features’ in order to promote his sense of
maleness. Instead, Mulac, Giles, Bradac
and Palomares suggest that, as respondents used a combination of features when
writing to other people, they were styling their speech so that it did not
heavily emphasise one gender or another.
They were, in a sense androgynous.

In conclusion, therefore, the
researchers propose that individuals have gender schemata and stereotypes. The former generate gendered language
features in an unconscious sense (hence the control descriptions show many gender-associated
features). The latter allows us to
consciously draw on our knowledge of gendered language when we are prompted to
do so. It is interesting that both the
schemata and the stereotypes produce similar linguistic features, as the features
used by participants (be it consciously or unconsciously) were consistent
across the tasks.

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